Merry-Go-Round Discussion with two American Liberals as to Whether the War is Being Won

Kotzabasis says…

How clever of professor Krugman and New York Times columnist to use his “Four legs good, two legs bad” drill to open a hole to the old debate about the levity of the decision of the Iraq war encapsulated in his “They attacked us, and we are going to strike back.” After failing in all his prognostications about the unwinnable war and showering for years with mockery and disparagement the proponents and supporters of the war, now that the war is being won and Iraq makes its first strides toward democracy –with its corollary that history might after all crown the neocons with the laurels of victory-all he finds to fill the holes of his rotationally fallacious argument is to revive the old squib of the non-connection of Saddam with Osama and hence the conspiratorial origin of the war.

Although there was ample evidence, as provided by the NIE report, of such connection between the intelligent services of Saddam and agents of Osama, the Bush administration after the 9/11 attack was more concerned that this rudimentary connection might take in the near future a gargantuan form that would gravely threaten the strategic interests of the US and indeed, its own land and its people. No astute and responsible government could disregard such a potential threat and not take the defensive-offensive measures to negate it. It was in such a context that the decision to go to war was taken. As well as on the further reason that it’s always more prudent to defeat an irreconcilable and implacable enemy while he is still weak, which is an irreversible canon of war.

Lafaytte says…

Saddam disliked Osama, see here, a minor fact that seems to escape you.
Saddam could not abide Osama’s Saudi Salafist tendencies which for the larger part of Sunni Muslims outside of Saudi Arabia, was far too fundamental. Which is why, when Osama proffered troops in the war (1980-8 against their supposed common enemy (the Iranian Shiites), Saddam refused. And he was not such a fool as to partner with the man responsible for 9/11 later on.

Of course, such subtleties are beyond people who view the world only through the prism of Judeo-Christian religious history. In fact, these subtleties are at the very heart of the modern Muslim world.

But, subtlety is not the forte of this lead-headed administration, which is why Uncle Sam finds himself in very deep sneakers in the Middle East, embroiled in a war he cannot win and only loose with grace.

Kotzabasis says…

Of course Saddam was a secular leader. And indeed, he might have “disliked” and not “trusted’ fanatics. But the game of power politics, which Saddam played as a virtuoso in the Arab world, is not propelled by likes and dislikes. And talking of subtleties, Saddam could see the ascendancy of Osama’s fanatics in the Muslim world and wanted to have contact with them not because of a predilection of amity toward them but because he wanted to control them and use them for his own geopolitical goals. It’s this subtlety that escapes you. And it would be wise for someone who lives in a glass house not to throw stones at others, such as “this lead-headed administration”, as it’s obvious that subtlety is not your forte either.

Lafaytte says…

Once again you are showing your ignorance of Muslim mentality and its subtlety. You wouldn’t be the Ultimate Crusader perchance?

You justified the invasion of Iraq based upon a false argument – an improbable relationship between Hussein and bin Laden. We’ve been through this huckstering nonsense before. Why, on earth, bring it up again?

War in Iraq is indeed good for American business. I do hope you’ve invested your son in it.
Saddam could see the ascendancy of Osama’s fanatics in the Muslim world and wanted to have contact with them not because of a predilection of amity toward them but because he wanted to control them and USE them for his own geopolitical goals.

What is this you’re submission for a James Bond film?

It’s hallucinatory nonsense. Saddam simply wanted to maintain Sunni control over a country that was largely populated by Shiites (who outnumber the Sunnis by 3 to 1).

“And it would be wise for someone who lives in a glass house not to throw stones at others … as it’s obvious that subtlety is not your forte either.”

Yeah, right. I live in a glass house. Now you are actually getting funny. In fact hilarious.

Bruce Wilder says…

Kotzabasis: “I’m using the metrics of incontrovertible reality: Reduction of violence, the defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq, the defeat and disarming of the Mahdi militia, and the first strides of Iraq toward democracy . . . “

I think you are confusing the Right-wing Noise Machine’s continuing kabuki play version of the Iraq War with a reality, with which you are too little acquainted.

“Reduction in violence”, I guess, is the new peace, like pink is the new black — hopefully a short-lived fashion. You have scarcely any idea what the Mahdi Militia is, let alone why the U.S. should be the least bit interested in its vicissitudes.
Al Qaeda in Iraq?? “Defeating” Al Qaeda in Iraq is swatting a swarm of specially imported may flies with a $3 trillion sledge hammer, which we financed by borrowing from China — not the kind of pointless, extravagant and unnecessary victory any sane person would celebrate.

Kotzabasis says…

Bruce-Starting from the end of your post, victory over a mortal foe is priceless and only the historically fatuous would not celebrate. The “Mahdi Militia” being the major combative militia against the coalition forces and you say that “the US should be the least bit interested in its vicissitudes.” In what kind of strategic cuckoo land are you domiciled?

But two words of your post provide the key to the secrets of your heart, “hopefully” and “unnecessary.”

By ‘discolouring’ the “reduction of violence” by your intellectually invented colours or rather by ‘defining’ it, “like pink is the new black—hopefully (m.e.) a short-lived fashion,” you show pellucidly that your hope lies in a future increase of violence against the Iraqi people and the coalition forces, so you can justify your original misplaced antiwar stand and gratify as well your fervent anti-Bush emotions. And your unnecessary victory over a deadly irreconcilable enemy reveals your historical blindness and ignorance as well as your bereftness of foresight.

Lastly, ironically by your own ‘unborrowed’ sledge hammer you knock yourself off your pedestal of “institutional ethical injunctions” as an outcome of your ‘secret’ wish to see the US defeated in this war, which as a nation is the foundation of your institutional moral existence, according to your own philosophical standards. This is intellectual, spiritual, and ethical suicide at its best.

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Attack on 9/11 an Existential Threat to Western Civilization

By Con George-Kotzabasis 

The following paper is the introduction of my book Unveiling The War Against Terror, published in Melbourne on May 9, 2004. It’s republished here in Special Forces… in memory of that brutal attack and as the first post on this blog. 

September 11 has placed open societies and their democratic freedoms at the crossroads of victory or subjugation. No intellectualist quibbling or obfuscation can cover and evade this historic fact. Fanatic Muslim terrorists pose a threat to civilized societies of biblical proportions, especially if they acquire weapons of mass destruction through rogue states.

Yet the liberal intelligentsia in its necrophilous stance attempts to shift the blame from the terrorist perpetrators to their victims. In their mind’s eyes, September 11 was the comeuppance of America for the ills the latter had “rained” upon the oppressed of the world by spreading its rapacious eagle’s wings over the globe in its pursuit of dominance and empire. Thus the terrorist’s threat is subordinated and replaced by the liberal invention of its own “evil empire”. Turning logic on its head, fanatic terrorism becomes less dangerous and is transformed into a “lesser evil”. In an ironic twist, the threat posed by terrorists against the West, is turned into the threat of the “Lone Avenger”. But that the latter might ride through the canyons of America, in his pursuit of “punishing evil,” not with six caliber pistols in his holsters but with nuclear weapons, is of no concern to them.

Hence, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are all liberals. Foreordaining the destruction of Western societies by a fanatic horde of religious barbarians. People, who have studied history in the sublime pages of Thucydides, Gibbon, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Meinecke, and Huntington, can only rally one answer to this great threat. Fight it to the death with no quarter given to it.

History has transparently shown, that the greatest atrocities against mankind were committed by religious fundamentalists, and by all omniscient purist ideologues. Examples are the religious wars of 17th Century Europe, which decimated almost two thirds of its population, and the Nazi and Communist ideologies that massacred millions in the 20th Century in their pursuit to breathe life, like God, to their misplaced and displaced utopias. Muslim fundamentalist inspired terror, is also set in among these dangerous misplaced utopias. But it is even more dangerous, in that its proponents and its fanatically blind activists unshakably believe are guided by the invisible hand of Allah and that they are His instruments.

This is the reason why all diplomatic overtures in this war against terrorism and its state sponsors, are doomed to failure. It is just impossible to negotiate any set of compromises of give and take, which is the substance of diplomacy, with these Muslim fundamentalists. It would just be as futile an attempt, as it would be to argue against God.

My first paper, ‘Unveiling the War against Terror’ presages precisely the above. The Bush Administration would not enter into this course of diplomatic failure and it would not be lured by the United Nations’ siren songs. While it was wise of the Administration to forge a notable coalition against terrorism, the latter would not be indispensable in its fight against terror. The same paper predicts the unconventionality of the war against terror, i.e., the primary role Special Forces would play in this war - and the splendid performance of the Australian SAS Forces in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq, exemplified this role - as well as the defeat of the Taliban and al Qaeda, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of most media commentators, who asserted that the American forces would not win and would be bogged down in Afghanistan, just like the Soviet forces. It was also prescient in its finding that strategically it would be a pre-emptive war, hence, anticipating the Pentagon’s new strategy against terror and against rogue states. (This paper was sent to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in November 2001 ).

The second paper titled ‘U.S. Unilateralism only Alternative to Multilateral Weakness’, responds to The Open Letter of the former Governor General Bill Hayden, and of three former prime ministers, Fraser, Whitlam, and Hawke, and condemns their un-historic and populist stand against America’s impending war in Iraq. Their ‘un-heroic cunctation’, to quote John Maynard Keynes, is another monument of folly build with the debris of Munich. To await for the more and more evanescent imprimatur for the war in Iraq by the UN Security Council, would have been the ultimate inanity. The paper also predicts, that the ‘missing star in this constellation of darkness’ (the signers of The Open Letter), Paul Keating, would also take an anti-American stand, which soon afterwards he did, but as is his wont as primo uomo, he would give his performance as a “soloist”.

The third paper titled, ‘How to Legitimize the Interim Government in Iraq’ … is a strategic proposal and was sent for this purpose to both President Bush and vice-President Cheney in late August 2003. As is shown by subsequent events, the Americans put on a fast track the formation of both the Interim Government in Iraq, as well as the arming of the Iraqis, two of the suggestions that I had made in this paper. I am confident, that my third suggestion, which is the axis of my proposal in this paper, the master plan, i.e., the Iraqi people should be given the equity of the nation’s oil wealth, will also be adopted. And the Interim Government of Iraq at its formation in July 2004, will make this historic pronouncement to its people, and by doing so will confer ‘unassailable legitimacy’ to itself.

All the other papers emphasize that the war against global terror is a two front war, that is, one also has to fight the rogue states if one is serious in defeating this terrorist menace. As these rogue states have the potential of becoming the suppliers of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Moreover, one of them predicts that the defeat of one rogue state, in this case Iraq, will have domino effects upon all other rogue states. And the dominoes have already started falling, as the recent capitulation of Libya has shown.

The war against global terror and its state sponsors is an existential war, a war of survival, and cannot be fought on humane grounds. All wars brutalize their combatants and under their immense pressures can break the strongest of wills, the best of disciplines. The war against global terror and its state sponsors magnifies this brutality. Its combatants are fighting, and are threatened by a shadowy enemy and cannot distinguish easily friend from foe. In Iraq, American soldiers are giving candy to Iraqi children, but as soon as they turn their backs to them, the latter are throwing stones at the soldiers in place of thanks. It is due to the heavy pressures of terrorist warfare that the American soldiers’ discipline is buckling and, while regrettable and even deplorable, one can see and understand the torture of prisoners in Iraq and in Afghanistan as one result of this. It should also not be forgotten that most of the prisoners were and are terrorists who could provide vital information to their American interrogators about their networks that could save thousands of lives, as well as lead to the defeat of terrorists in the field of battle. In such a setting, the torture of prisoners is the tragic price of such a war that statesmanship must pay.

The papers are not written in the suave language of diplomats nor in the smoothing words of the gentile classes. In times of war, a writer has to mobilize his words, as a general has to mobilize his troops for battle, forcefully. They are written for the purpose of rallying people behind their governments, as a call to arms. They are also written to provoke people to search for the truth and debunk all those who claim to possess it. And last but not least, to salvage the truth of the war from the politically designated distortions and fabrications of its liberal and leftist critics, that has been so characteristic of much Western thinking and so ubiquitous throughout most of the media since 9/11.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now

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